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Geology News
Florida Current Events

Wildfires blazed through Florida on Monday, fueled by recent drought and strong winds. Several separate fires caused destruction and injuries in Brevard County, while another fire in Volusia County burned about 800 acres.

Over 100 years ago, home and farm construction necessitated draining the wetlands of Florida’s Everglades. Now, part of the Everglades will be restored to help preserve the area’s wildlife. The project is the biggest wetlands restoration effort on the planet, and will make Florida the home of the world’s largest above-ground reservoir.

Did you know that every day, at least 300 million gallons of sewage water is dumped into the ocean off the coast of Florida? The water is partially treated, but is still not even suitable for watering lawns. Obviously, this is the cause of a multitude of problems. The state is expected to begin working on shutting down the outfall pipes.

Munir Humayun of Florida State University and NASA colleagues authored a paper, “Partitioning of Palladium at High Pressures and Temperatures During Core Formation,” in the journal Nature Geoscience. The paper challenges a popular theory that all of Earth’s water and several elements were added to the Earth by impacts with icy comets, meteorites and other passing objects.

Anthropologists in Florida have used fossil evidence to engineer the types of sounds that a Neanderthal larynx would have been capable of. They apparently lacked the quantal vowel sounds of modern speech.

Burmese pythons — an invasive species in south Florida that can grow to 20 feet long and weigh 200 pounds — are now spreading out from Everglades National Park. Python populations have been discovered in Big Cypress National Preserve to the north, Miami’s water management areas to the northeast, Key Largo to the southeast, and many state parks, municipalities, and public and private lands in the region.

NOAA’s Seasonal Drought Outlook shows developing drought conditions continuing in the southern United States with areas of developing drought in Florida, Texas, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.

NOAA Image

The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center forecasts that the drought in the southeastern United States will continue, with odds favoring an expansion of drought conditions into Florida and the eastern Gulf Coast. Some areas have a 15 inch rain deficit for the year.

SCUBA Divers in Florida set a new world’s record for the longest underwater swim through cave passages. They entered Turner Sink, swam through 7 miles of passages and exited at Wakulla Springs State Park. This was the first underwater swim between the two cave systems.

NASA and the University of South Florida have created an interactive archive of Landsat Images of coral reefs. This website allows you to click on a world map with coral reef locations shown in red. It then delivers a map window that you can use to zoom and pan Landsat images of the reefs in that area.

NOAA is working on a series of relief models that will help assess the tsunami and storm-driven flood threats for the eastern coast of the United States. Just finished are models for Long Island, New York; Atlantic City, New Jersey; and Daytona Beach. Florida.

Tropical Storm Noel dropped heavy rain, triggered landslides, caused floods and killed 81 people on the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. Now it moves out over the Atlantic and towards the Bahamas, possibly skirting Florida.

If sea level rises just a few meters, the much of coastal Florida, the Florida Keys and the Everglades will be under water. This interactive Google Map by Alex Tingle of Firetree.net allows you to investigate several geographic areas that are prone to flooding from sea level rise and modify water levels to see the geographic inundation change.

USGS Image

As population and business activity increase around public water supply wells the number of contamination problems increase. USGS has released a report: Anthropogenic Organic Compounds in Ground Water and Finished Water of Community Water Systems in the Northern Tampa Bay Area, Florida, which documents this problem.

NASA Image

The State of Florida is using the low water stand of Lake Okeechobee as an opportunity to remove some sediments from the lake bed. They are found to contain elevated levels of arsenic and other pesticides.

A large Saharan dust plume that departed Africa on June 22, 2007, was observed over the Caribbean Sea on Wednesday and is expected to reach Miami today. This is the first large dust cloud this year to complete the 6,000-mile trip from Africa to Florida. A satellite image of the dust over the Caribbean Sea can be seen at the Earth Observatory website.

NASA Image

Long term drought in Florida has resulted in a water level decline at Lake Okeechobee. The water level there has fallen to a record low. This has resulted in drying out of the aquatic vegetation. In late May a wind-driven fire spread very rapidly across the dry lake bed, burning over 10,000 acres. Earth Observatory has a satellite image of the entire lake with the burn areas clearly visible.

“Global Warning: The World’s Endangered Destinations” is a photo presentation of sixteen locations where global warming is expected to have a significant impact. These include: The Everglades; Kenai Fjords National Park; Great Barrier Reef; The Netherlands; Mt. Kilimanjaro; Tuvalu; South Georgia Island; Dalian, China; Venice; Tokyo, Japan; Wengen, Switzerland; Manhattan, New York City; Halong Bay, Vietnam; New Orleans; London, England; and Northwest Territories, Canada.

NASA Image

Subtropical Storm Andrea has been offshore of the Carolinas for the past few days. A subtropical storm is a storm that forms outside of the tropics but which has many of the characteristics of a tropical storm such as hurricane-force winds, driving rains, low pressure and sometimes an eye. This image shows some great cloud patterns but it also shows how the wind is distributing the smoke from wild fires in Georgia and Florida (the red dots on the image are wildfire locations).